The intricacies of the dales

The little intricate waterfalls of the dales are the hidden gems of this land. Everyone knows the big famous ones like Aysgarth and Hardraw (both of which have had visits by Kevin Costner) but tucked away on some of the small high altitude streams are jewels of waterfalls that are rarely visited. Some of these are virtually dry but surge into life once the clouds burst. These ephemeral places contain ecology trained by evolution to cope with constant change.

Walks over the hills brings a natural closeness with the land. You can become lost in the scales here. One moment watching pipits swarm across coarse grass swards to pick at tiny beetles the next taking in wide vistas or your vision being tunnelled down a far winding dale. Hills like Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent always seem to break into the skyline. Their obvious stepped tops revealing millions of years of strata, borne from scales we can barely grasp.

Heading over the top from Ballowfields the sound of water rushing beneath scree piles highlights that you are walking over limestone. The rock is taken into solution by acidic rain and streams drop underground forming caves and caverns from the tiniest of sink holes that swallow water with a giants thirst.

The water here doesnt behave as expected. Below the summit of Addleborough, a brooding hill that decieves its low altitude, is a waterfall dry for most of the year. Water is swallowed from the stream above and as you walk over the land you can hear it bubbling and gurgling beneath the surface like a hungry stomach. And at the lower reaches of the redundant waterfall it re-emerges from two places before combining back into one of the best trout spawning streams of Wensleydale.

And if you walk the other way, towards Addleborough top, calcareous flushes clear and potable emerge from the ground. Just metres from their source they mix with dark peaty streams and then for a short distance two different waters flow side by side till they become mixed, their pH and chemistry settling somewhere between the two.

In many ways water has shaped this land. Over 300 million years ago coral reefs grew in tropical waters and their remnants now form the majority of rock in the dales. Then huge columns of frozen water scraped the land forming u-shaped valleys that are the prominent feature of the landscape. After this liquid water ran over the surface of these scraped clean valleys cutting narrow V's in the land and dissolving the rock to form the caves and caverns that form underground mosaics like fungal hyphae. This isn't a perfect timeline of the processes but the idea of how these places were formed is there.


In the last few thousand years people cultivated the land and our signals can be seen all over the floodplains and down to the Humber estuary. A soil core of these plains shows that the rate of sediment movement increased massively after we cleared the original vegetation. It shows that we can have bigger impacts on the land then we suppose. But it is this patchwork of fields delineated by dry stone walls created by farming that is one of the biggest draws to the dales, and rightly so.